Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy and this is our 161 episode.

In words with more than one syllable, not every syllable is given equal emphasis.

One syllable is stressed.

The stressed syllable is said louder, for more time, and often at a higher pitch than the other syllables of a word. When learning a new vocabulary

word, it's always a good idea to identify the stressed syllable of that word, because, as you

will see, we can't understand the phonics of a word until we know where the stressed syllable is. This is because

the stressed syllable controls all the other syllables of a word. Today we're going to focus on

the syllable next to the stressed syllable. Why? Because of a concept called schwa. Schwa is a quick, reduced vowel sound that is

often pronounced similar to a quick short U sound. Uh. Shwa occurs most often on an unstressed

syllable that is next to a stressed syllable.

If I don't know where the stressed syllable of a word is, I won't know how to find shua.

In addition to stressed syllables and syllables reduced to schwa, there are also secondarily stressed

syllables.

But I'm going to save that topic for another episode.

Before I continue, let me remind you that you can find the transcript for this episode

by going to www.prenuncian.com slash podcast. Also, we'll link to the

pronuncian.com lesson regarding schwa from this episode's transcript page. So if you want to learn more,

that's the place to go. When a syllable is stressed, it's really only the vowel portion of that syllable that is stressed.

So when we talk about syllable stress, we're going to focus on the vowel sound.

In a multi-syllable word, the vowel sound of the stressed syllable

is the most likely syllable to be phonetic. In other words, that syllable is the most likely

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